She took another bite, chewed. “Why am I doing this one alone?”
Coulton looked at her. She was surprised by the emotion in his face. “There’ve been … inquiries,” he said, reluctant. “I heard about it right before we left Liverpool. A man, asking questions. About Mississippi, about US currencies. He’s got an interest, you might say, in the children we been collecting. Certainly in the Ovid boy. I half feared we’d see him here in Natchez. I’ll be watching for him on the way back.”
She studied Coulton’s face in the quiet. “He’s a detective?”
Coulton shook his head. “Used to be associated with the institute. His name is Marber. Jacob Marber.”
“Jacob … Marber.”
“Aye.”
There was something in the way Coulton spoke that made her pause. She adjusted the knife and fork on her plate, thinking about it. “You knew him,” she said.
“I knew of him. He had a … reputation.” Coulton picked at his hands. “Jacob Marber is a dangerous man, Miss Quicke. If he’s hunting Charlie Ovid, it’s best the lad is taken off to London quick. You should be all right with this Marlowe boy, out in Illinois.” Coulton grimaced, as if deciding whether to say more. “Marber blamed the institute for something, something that happened. I don’t know what it was. Someone died, I think. It doesn’t matter. We lost track of him years ago, haven’t heard from him since. There are those who still think he’s dead. I don’t. He was too good at what he did, one of the best.”
“Which was?”
Coulton met her eye. “Same as what we do. Except his methods were bloodier.”
Alice thought it over. “How will I know him? If I see him?”
“You’ll know him. He’ll be the one what scares you.”
“I don’t scare.”
Coulton sighed. “You do. You just don’t know it yet.”
Alice folded her hands in her lap, suddenly chilled. She watched their reflections in the warped glass of the riverboat window, the great wide currents of the Mississippi all around them out there in the darkness, the waiter where he stood with his wrists crossed at his back. The plush green armchairs and the dying ferns. All of it in the hazy glow of the gaslights in their sconces.
“He’ll be disappointed then, your Mr. Marber,” she said. “If he goes to Remington.”
Coulton smiled tiredly at her toughness, and his smile faded as he pushed his plate aside and got to his feet. He wiped his greasy fingers in the napkin.
“It would be best you were far from there, if he does,” he said quietly.
3
THE KID AT THE END OF THE WORLD
It’d been thirteen months since Brynt had last had the Dream. But it was back, bad as ever, and it frightened her so much that every night now she tried not to sleep, tried to sit up until morning with a strong coffee in their dark wagon, watching Marlowe’s little face breathing in the bunk, telling herself in the moonlight that nothing was the matter, nothing was wrong, they were safe.
But every night, in the end, her eyes would get heavy, her chin would nod, and the Dream would take over.
Always it started the same. She was crouched in her childhood wardrobe, trying to hide. The acrid reek of mothballs, the rustle of hanging clothes. Somehow she was little again, a girl, though she had never been little, not really. It was her uncle’s rooming house in San Francisco, it was night, and when she opened the wardrobe a crack with her finger, she could see moonlight streaming in. Though she was a little girl she was also somehow herself too, old Brynt, careworn, tired, and little Marlowe was with her, crying softly with fear. Slowly she climbed out of the wardrobe, took Marlowe by the hand, slowly she held a finger to her lips for quiet.
There was something in the apartment house with them.
They made their way to the hall. Steep narrow stairs, silver light from the moon on the landing. All the doors to the rooms standing open in shadow. And Brynt and the child’s slow, impossibly slow descent, step by creaking step, Brynt straining to hear with all her concentrated intensity for the sounds of that other in the house, that thing, wherever it might be.
And then she heard it. Footsteps overhead. A darkness emerged onto the third floor, walking slowly, flecks of shadow swarming around it. Brynt started to run, taking the stairs two at a time, dragging the boy along behind her. But now the darkness was coming, impossibly fast, it reached out a long, long arm and there were fingers, pale, and curled, and strangely elongated, and all the light seemed to be sucked up into that hand. Marlowe screamed. The shadow had no face; and where the mouth should have been, all was—
Brynt sat up. She felt the blanket tangled in her bulk, the sweat on her face cooling in the dimness. Starlight was pouring in through the high, narrow window. She brushed the hair from her face.
Marlowe.
He wasn’t in his bed. She lurched down out of the bunk in a panic, the circus wagon creaking and shuddering under her weight, and thrust her way through the ragged curtain. Marlowe was eating a biscuit with butter at the narrow table, a book of engravings open in front of him. They were Doré’s engravings from Dante’s Inferno, eerie souls twisting in torment, a gift from the reverend long ago, the only book in the wagon aside from the Bible. She felt her heart in her chest slow.
“You all right, honey?” she said, in a forced voice. “What’re you doing?”
“Reading.”
She eased herself down beside him. “Couldn’t sleep?”
“You were talking again,” he said. “Was it that dream again?”
She looked at him. She nodded.
“Was I in it?”
Again she nodded.
The starlight was silver in his black hair, in the sleeves of his sleeping gown. He looked at her with dark, serious eyes. His face was so pale, he might have been one of the dead. “Did I help you this time?” he asked.
“Yes you did, honey,” she lied. “You just keep on saving me.”
“Good,” he said sturdily, and folded himself into her arms.
She ran a hand through his hair. The last time she had suffered the Dream like this was the week the reverend had died, in that damp moldering room in Spitalfields, more than a year ago now. He had held on for two years after that dark week, when Marlowe’s mother had vanished in the fog, Brynt trying to look out for the both of them all the while, the little boy and the dying man, angry at Eliza half the time, afraid for her the rest. She always kept thinking maybe Eliza would come back but she never did. The child never spoke of that night, hardly spoke of his mother at all, in fact, and then only at bedtime, when he was sleepy. Of course Brynt knew Eliza Mackenzie Grey was not his mother, not really, but the poor girl had saved the child from abandonment and cared for him no matter how hard it got and loved him as if he were her own flesh and blood. If that wasn’t mothering then Brynt did not know what was.
But now the Dream was back. Brynt sat with Marlowe at the night table and felt a kind of tingling in her fingertips, almost like a foreboding, almost as if the weather were about to change, and because of this she knew something was coming, something bad, and they were not ready.
* * *
Marlowe wasn’t like other children.